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The field of crisis informatics now has a decade-long history of designing tools that leverage social media to support decision-makers situation awareness. Despite this history, there remains few examples of these tools adopted by practitioners. Recent fieldwork with public safety answering points and first responders has led to an awareness of the need for tools that gather actionable information, rather than situational awareness alone. This paper contributes to an ongoing discussion about these concepts by proposing a model that embeds the concept of actionable information into Endsley's model of situation awareness. We also extend the insights of this model to the design implications of future information processing systems. 

During the COVID-19 health crisis, local public officials continue to expend considerable energy encouraging citizens to comply with prevention measures in order to reduce the spread of infection. During the pandemic, mask-wearing has been accepted among health officials as a simple preventative measure; however, some local areas have been more likely to comply than others. This paper explores methods to better understand local attitudes towards mask-wearing as a tool for public health officials’ situational awareness when preparing public messaging campaigns. This exploration compares three methods to explore local attitudes: sentiment analysis, n-grams, and hashtags. We also explore hashtag co-occurrence networks as a possible starting point to begin the filtering process. The results show that while sentiment analysis is quick and easy to employ, the results offer little insight into specific local attitudes towards mask-wearing, while examining hashtags and hashtag co-occurrence networks may be used a tool for a more robust understanding of local areas when attempting to gain situational awareness. 

Public education programs improve public safety by teaching citizens how to mitigate risks and respond to emergencies. To improve these efforts, studies in the fields of risk communication and emergency management have examined the design and communication of public education information. However, few studies examine the diversity of information officials communicate to the public when state and national-level public education programs are decentralized and administered by local government agencies. This study reports findings from a content analysis of text-to-911 information published on the websites of local 911 service entities across the state of Texas. Overall, these websites communicate sparse, uneven, and sometimes inconsistent information to citizens across the state regarding the availability of text-to-911 service, when and for whom texting 911 is appropriate, and instructions and warnings for texting 911 during an emergency. These findings suggest the need for public education resources that help local governments communicate with local audiences and coordinate communications across jurisdictions working to accomplish state and national public-safety objectives. 

Next-Generation 911 (NG911) infrastructure will replace analog systems designed to support voice services for landline 911 callers with digital, IP-based systems that will allow smartphone users to “call” 911 via voice, text, image, and streaming video. This brief paper reports findings from a workshop conducted at the 2019 911 Early Adopters’ Summit, during which local 911 professionals from across the United States reflected on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with the adoption of NG911 infrastructure and, in particular, multimedia 911 services. Workshop participants pointed to long-standing issues NG911 stands to exacerbate, including high non-emergency call volumes, poor staff retention, and inadequate psychological support which the influx of multimedia 911 calls, including those with graphic imagery, may worsen. At the same time, participants looked to local, existing resources to mitigate these issues and exploit new opportunities afforded through NG911 infrastructure. Using these findings, preliminary recommendations are offered to improve information resources available to local 911 professionals adopting NG911 systems for effective and efficient multimedia 911 services.